Why?

When my kids were little they would do anything to stay out of trouble. Now, by anything I do not mean that they would listen to me, do what they were supposed to do, and always be polite. No, that would have been too easy. Instead, they would do their level best to hide everything they did that was wrong because if I didn't see it, then it didn't happen. Right?

My oldest two have since grown up and moved out and I have had a grand old time lately listening to the various things my oldest daughter has had to deal with in having a 5 year old stepson. It's like Karma!

I have had one child left living at home for the past year and so pretty much everything is focused on him and only him. Occasionally the state of his room gets on my nerves but for the most part the thing that gets him into trouble is not doing or even worse, doing and not turning in his school work. Everything I have yelled at him about in the past 6 months has had something to do with school.

Flash forward to yesterday. I am slaving over the laundry and wonderful mother that I am, walk into his room to hang up some of his shirts I had just finished. He is sitting in his gaming chair and playing a game, talking to someone on the phone and generally just being a slug for the day. I open his closet and my head exploded.
The boy is quick, I gotta give him that. He immediately got off the phone and threw down his controller and was up a whole lot quicker than I would have ever given him credit for being able to move.

"I got it!" he said, a little panicked.

For almost a week now I have asked him to clean up his closet so at this point I call him a liar and tell him that no, I dont believe him and proceed to start throwing stuff around in his closet.

For the most part he has eleventy gazillion blankets, comforters, and sheets in his closet on the top shelf. Well, they are supposed to be on his top shelf, folded neatly, but no...they were flung all over the place like the blanket monster had just thrown up. In between the blankets and such are various other things and clothes, clean clothes, dirty clothes, everything...ALL ON THE FLOOR OF THE CLOSET.

I decided to just get rid of most of the blankets. No point in them being there and its not like we really needed them all. There was one comforter sitting on the shelf wadded up. All the rest of them were on the floor. "Why is it," I screamed, "that you can have only one of them land up on the shelf and it can't even be folded correctly???"

At this point his face contorts to something I can identify as downright panic. I go to grab it off the shelf and he tries pushing it back on the shelf. "NO, I WILL GET IT....PLEASE JUST LET ME GET IT" he fairly screeched.

Well, I figure that he had his chance and I am ticked now so I grab it again and go to pull it down. And underneath this comforter find a pair of shoes...caked with mud.

"Why do you have a pair of your shoes up here?" I ask.

By this point the boy's face is almost white. I fear he is going to pass out on me and cannot figure out why. I mean, yeah I am mad and all but it's not like he hasn't seen me mad before. Maybe he was thinking that since we were in a closet with hangers that I was going to go Mommie Dearest on him. But, I don't have any wire hangers and plastic just isn't the same. I am flummoxed.

"I uh,um, I'm gonna go clean them now" he muttered.

So I look closer and realize those aren't just any shoes. Nope, those are Chad's dress shoes that he borrowed a few months ago and then apparently decided to go mudding in while wearing.

Why couldn't he just clean them when he got them muddy in the first place? Why couldn't he have stayed out of the mud for the twenty minutes that he was wearing the damn shoes? Why did he hide the shoes in his closet? Why, if he is going to be sneaky couldn't he have just cleaned his damn closet the first hundred and sixty seven times I asked him?

Why do I even bother to ask?